The default API tooling that comes to your mind is Postman.
Postman is cloud based - the other offline alternatives are on their way to enshittification.
Is there any solution to the problem or we should all default to curl.
This technically breaks Rule 3, since it doesn’t cover a self-hosted service or application. However, “local over cloud” is always welcome here. So, leaving this post up, but locking to encourage discussion in the proper communities.
There are a few other options, such as Bruno.
But if you can spare the time to learn curl it’s probably the most versatile.
subscription based right?
It’s free for a single user, but you pay a subscription per user for collaborative use.
I’m just a solo enthusiast so it’s free for what I’d use it for.
Edit: I guess to your earlier point perhaps this a step towards enshitification and they might well put more and more tools behind a paywall.
Yup, Bruno is my choice as well coming from Insomnia and Postman. I was lucky enough to purchase the early supporter lifetime license when it was available, so I’ll be using it for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it doesn’t enshittify as another commenter pointed out.
While I still use curl for simple requests, I really do like having a GUI. Features like prettifying requests and responses, being able to fold code, saving requests, shared authorization across multiple requests, etc. Are the reasons why I don’t think I could ever really use CLI options.
Postman locked all my locally saved requests away after an update unless I created an account with them. I wasn’t updating very often because every update made it shittier.
Fuck postman.
I’ve been all in on Bruno ever since.
Bruno and Yaak are both pretty decent, I use Yaak on a daily basis. There’s also HTTPie, Hoppscotch, Insomnia and Scalar.
There’s also https://hurl.dev/ for those that like curl
That looks cool, I also just discovered https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden, which seems similar but uses Markdown instead.
In emacs, there is http mode, and you can have http code blocks straight in an org mode document, it’s amazing. And it works with the overall org babel system, so variables can come from other blocks, potentially in different languages.
What about Hoppscotch? hoppscotch.io
I still use Insomnia as I think it offers the better experience over Postman, but I wouldn’t recommend it as it gets shifted more and more into a forced subscription model.
I have installed Hopscotch, but Insomnia still works so I never felt the need to switch - but I am ready to do so.
